Graphviz

An Open Source way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks.

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specifications

Graphviz is open source, freely distributed and cross-platform graph visualization (a way of displaying structural information as diagrams of abstract networks or graphs) software suite that includes various graph layout applications.

Features at a glance

Key features include web-based and interactive user interfaces, auxiliary utilities, language bindings, and libraries, as well as powerful functionality for dealing with concrete diagrams, such as options for fonts, line styles, colors, hyperlinks, shapes and tabular node layouts.

In addition, the software can be used in many areas, including software engineering, networking, database design, bioinformatics, machine learning, web design, as well as in visual interfaces for many other domains. Graphviz is not a Visio replacement.

Getting started with Graphviz

To install the Graphviz software on your Linux computer, you will have to download the tarball (tar.gz file) from the dedicated download section above, save it somewhere on your path, extract it, open a terminal emulator and navigate to the location of the extracted files.

Run the “./configure && make” command, without quotes, to configure and compile the project. After that, you can execute the “make install” command (without quotes) as root to install Graphviz on your machine and make it available system wide to all users. Additionally, you can use the pre-built binary packages from the default software repositories of your GNU/Linux operating system.

Under the hood, supported OSes and availability

The program is written entirely in the C programming language, which means that it is low on resources and lightweight, officially supported on all GNU/Linux platforms, as well as on the Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

It is available for download primarily as a universal sources archive, which can be used to optimize the project for your computer’s hardware architecture. Both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware platforms are supported at this time.